Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

Here's a fun one: firefox lists its current count at about 2.5M LOC, from roughly 1M commits during the years.

You end up with about 3 lines added per commit, which is not ridiculous when you consider that most would be editions rather than full additions.

Here, we have 1500 PRs and 1M LOC, which is about 650 added LOC per PR. Remember, not 650 lines total in the PR, but +650 balance after additions-removals.

Fun questions for attentive readers:

- What does a project growing at a rate of one full firefox-codebase worth of LOC per year look like, a decade down the line?

- What does the line count say about the verbosity of the tool, and what does it say about outcomes that the purpose of the project isn't clearly disclosed?

- Do we have reasons to care about LOC in a world where we don't write code manually? What happens to token usage numbers when the codebase is significantly larger?

- If it was confirmed that LLM usage blows up your line count, what's the implication for codebases that want to return to manual coding after months of usage? (Say, because the tool gets expensive).

Article is from February so that tracks

Feels like the active discovery going on is trying to understand what is computer vs what is AI, for every product.

Agents help a ton with the discovery, but the act of building a product needs a deeper level of thought and validation to make it actually better than what came before. So IMO what you see is people still learning what needs to be understood and crafted first hand to make a product better (including economics)

We’ll get there if more of us try

The other day I came across to a video showing workers in a e-vape factory. They pick up a bunch of e-vapes from the conveyor belt (each has 6 e-vape think), stick in their mouth and vigorously vape all of them for about 5 seconds, then test the next bunch. Humans reviewing hundreds of lines of change in a PR written by AI is not very different.

digression:

It's interesting this was submitted to HN over 15 times since it was published in February: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

But this is the only submission that's had any traction. Since the content is nearly the same for all submissions, it highlights how getting to the front page can be a bit random. (Though this is the only one that capitalized 'Leveraged' so maybe that's the secret)